There is a very simple way to make elections more accessible: make voting compulsory. As an Australian, I simply cannot fathom how the US seems to constantly struggle with issues such as electoral "accessibility". The advantages of compulsory voting are numerous:
... compelling voters to the polls for an election mitigates the impact that external factors may have on an individual's capacity to vote such as the weather, transport, or restrictive employers. If everybody must vote, then restrictions on voting are easily identified and steps are taken to remove them. It is a measure to prevent disenfranchisement of the socially disadvantaged. Countries with compulsory voting generally hold elections on a Saturday or Sunday as evidenced in nations such as Australia, to ensure that working people can fulfill their duty to cast their vote. Postal and pre-poll voting is provided to people who cannot vote on polling day, and mobile voting booths may also be taken to old age homes and hospitals to cater for immobilized citizens.
Fraud is easily identified when everyone has to cast a vote - you cannot tick off a name more than once.
The arguments against compulsory voting generally boil down to thinking that the government asking for one's opinion qualifies as totalitarianism. But there is a simple solution to this.
If voters do not want to support any given choice, they may cast spoilt votes or blank votes. According to compulsory voting supporters, this is preferred to not voting at all because it ensures there is no possibility that the person has been intimidated or prevented from voting should they wish.
The spin on the story in some areas of the media is also a nice illustration of the way cowardly people will back the police state by blaming the victim.
This psychological phenomenon is well-known to be one of the most powerful drivers of human behaviour.
People will go to extremes and fight to preserve their sense of self, their ego. After all everyone believes that they are a good, rational person. Anything which contradicts that produces powerfully uncomfortable cognitive dissonance that drives people to rationalise their choices any way they can.
Nonsense. All significant accidents have happened in old (in some cases, 3 "generations" old) technology plants, and sometimes human error was a major component.
When it comes to failures in complex, potentially deadly systems like nuclear plants, "human error" isn't ever a factor. If the system relies on a human to act a certain way without a failsafe then it is just bad design, pure and simple. This book explains it well.
Zarniwoop pulled some notes out of a pocket.
"Now," he said, "you do rule the Universe, do you?"
"How can I tell?" said the man.
Zarniwoop ticked off a note on the paper.
"How long have you been doing this?"
"Ah," said the man, "this is a question about the past, is it?"
Zarniwoop looked at him in puzzlement. This wasn't exactly what he had been expecting.
"Yes," he said.
"How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?"
Exactly this. KDE 4 is a "next-gen" GUI done right, because thanks to the entire desktop comprising configurable widgets.
As well as the default Menu + Taskbar style (WinXP), you can have Dock + Menubar style (OS X) or Pinned Icons style (Win 7, Unity) or any combination of these.
Use RequestPolicy instead. It allows control of cross-site requests with domain-level granularity. So only sites you trust are able to gain access to domains like amazonaws.com, akamai.net etc. It basically has the same features as Noscript's ABE, but is much easier to use.
But in the WikiLeaks scenario, what is "the damage"? If any one
journalist is "compromised" (say, publishes the password in a book), all the
cables go public unredacted. This is true whether they are all sharing the same
password or not.
No, and that is the whole point. If they publish the password in a book, then
they themselves must also publish their copy of the archive - or the
password is useless. So if one organisation publishes their file, and then
another publishes their password, there is no issue.
If you are going to share extremely sensitive documents with several people, why the FUCK wouldn't you create several *different archives* with different passwords - one for each individual you are sharing the information with?!
Give each individual access for a short period of time, and then DELETE THE INDIVIDUAL FUCKING ARCHIVES FROM YOUR SERVER! This has the additional benefit of being able to trace any future leaks.
Seriously, if you have disseminated the password to your single "master copy" archive to multiple organisations, then it might as well not be encrypted. If they had created different archives + passwords for each recipient this would be a non-issue.
An analogous situation is where you're setting up a webserver which hosts multiple sites/apps. You run the server process of each site as a different user because that way if one site is exploited, the damage is contained to that site only.
I seriously wonder if Wikileaks employees run their desktops as root.
Do you think it's wrong to have a rifle in the house? My very point is that back when I grew up, ALMOST EVERYONE had one. Do you see what they did there?
You can still have a rifle in the house. It just can't be semi-automatic. This means that the guy who wants to do target practice or shoot roos can do so, but the guy who wants to easily kill as many people as possible in a short period of time has some difficulties.
Standardising on a non-free operating system thus encouraging people to download rootkitted warez.
Most people worldwide genuinely can't pay $250+ for an operating system.
Sciencedaily is good, but the sheer volume of content is very difficult to keep up with.
I personally like arstechnica's science coverage. Their articles are *always* well researched and written and usually very interesting.
http://arstechnica.com/science/
Re:Each major release is taking longer
on
KDE 4.7.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Did they return the multiple desktop and individual backgrounds? Locking Apps to specific Desktops?
No they haven't and they're still pushing Dolphin as the File manager instead of sticking with Konq, which worked quite well for that and browsing the web. Hell I found it quite useful when accessing an ftp site that I had write privs as it allowed me to simply copy files from the system to the server.
Yes they have. Konqeror is still there, and can be set as the default file manager if you want.
As a 3.5 user, I would have preferred them to simply bug fix and transition 3.5 over to QT4. Some of the restructuring was needed but the complete change to the UI was totally unneeded. Instead they had to copy MS and Vista and loose the one feature that made KDE stand out for me, which was the configurable desktops, background images and locking apps to specific desktops.
As I said, all these features are available, accessible, and are arguably better than they were in KDE 3. I honestly don't know how you haven't been able to discover them.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, it appears that a collection of facts is not copyrightable in Australia - specifically, a telephone directory:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCA/2010/44.html
There is a very simple way to make elections more accessible: make voting compulsory. As an Australian, I simply cannot fathom how the US seems to constantly struggle with issues such as electoral "accessibility". The advantages of compulsory voting are numerous:
Fraud is easily identified when everyone has to cast a vote - you cannot tick off a name more than once.
The arguments against compulsory voting generally boil down to thinking that the government asking for one's opinion qualifies as totalitarianism. But there is a simple solution to this.
The spin on the story in some areas of the media is also a nice illustration of the way cowardly people will back the police state by blaming the victim.
For example, see the Gizmodo article "US Detains and Deports Two Morons Over Dumb "Destroy America" Tweets":
According to documents released under Freedom of Information, the Attorney-General wants a "solution" to "be educative and aim to change the social norms."
That's right. They want to force "education" onto the population to make them want to prop up the content industry's failing business models.
Of course, only industry groups were invited to this meeting. I have to say, Ludlam is the reason that I voted greens in the last election.
Awesome. :-D
Do the QT 4 dance!
This psychological phenomenon is well-known to be one of the most powerful drivers of human behaviour.
People will go to extremes and fight to preserve their sense of self, their ego. After all everyone believes that they are a good, rational person. Anything which contradicts that produces powerfully uncomfortable cognitive dissonance that drives people to rationalise their choices any way they can.
It's an effect which appears pretty much everywhere: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/05/19/fanboyism-and-brand-loyalty/
Nonsense. All significant accidents have happened in old (in some cases, 3 "generations" old) technology plants, and sometimes human error was a major component.
When it comes to failures in complex, potentially deadly systems like nuclear plants, "human error" isn't ever a factor. If the system relies on a human to act a certain way without a failsafe then it is just bad design, pure and simple. This book explains it well.
Exactly this. KDE 4 is a "next-gen" GUI done right, because thanks to the entire desktop comprising configurable widgets.
As well as the default Menu + Taskbar style (WinXP), you can have Dock + Menubar style (OS X) or Pinned Icons style (Win 7, Unity) or any combination of these.
Where's the data? Has no-one migrated past Indonesia?
The end. No tracking, "evercookies" etc. Even blocks google tracking via google-analytics.
I hope Phoronix tanks, and soon. I prefer my articles in an essay format.
Yep, there's a reason why I pay a LWN subscription.
Use RequestPolicy instead. It allows control of cross-site requests with domain-level granularity. So only sites you trust are able to gain access to domains like amazonaws.com, akamai.net etc. It basically has the same features as Noscript's ABE, but is much easier to use.
https://www.requestpolicy.com/
But in the WikiLeaks scenario, what is "the damage"? If any one journalist is "compromised" (say, publishes the password in a book), all the cables go public unredacted. This is true whether they are all sharing the same password or not.
No, and that is the whole point. If they publish the password in a book, then they themselves must also publish their copy of the archive - or the password is useless. So if one organisation publishes their file, and then another publishes their password, there is no issue.
If you are going to share extremely sensitive documents with several people, why the FUCK wouldn't you create several *different archives* with different passwords - one for each individual you are sharing the information with?!
Give each individual access for a short period of time, and then DELETE THE INDIVIDUAL FUCKING ARCHIVES FROM YOUR SERVER! This has the additional benefit of being able to trace any future leaks.
Seriously, if you have disseminated the password to your single "master copy" archive to multiple organisations, then it might as well not be encrypted. If they had created different archives + passwords for each recipient this would be a non-issue.
An analogous situation is where you're setting up a webserver which hosts multiple sites/apps. You run the server process of each site as a different user because that way if one site is exploited, the damage is contained to that site only.
I seriously wonder if Wikileaks employees run their desktops as root.
Do you think it's wrong to have a rifle in the house? My very point is that back when I grew up, ALMOST EVERYONE had one. Do you see what they did there?
You can still have a rifle in the house. It just can't be semi-automatic. This means that the guy who wants to do target practice or shoot roos can do so, but the guy who wants to easily kill as many people as possible in a short period of time has some difficulties.
How is that a bad thing?
Australia also has a constitution. We just don't treat it like Moses brought it down off the mountain.
Standardising on a non-free operating system thus encouraging people to download rootkitted warez.
Most people worldwide genuinely can't pay $250+ for an operating system.
Sciencedaily is good, but the sheer volume of content is very difficult to keep up with.
I personally like arstechnica's science coverage. Their articles are *always* well researched and written and usually very interesting. http://arstechnica.com/science/
Did they return the multiple desktop and individual backgrounds? Locking Apps to specific Desktops?
Yes.
No they haven't and they're still pushing Dolphin as the File manager instead of sticking with Konq, which worked quite well for that and browsing the web. Hell I found it quite useful when accessing an ftp site that I had write privs as it allowed me to simply copy files from the system to the server.
Yes they have. Konqeror is still there, and can be set as the default file manager if you want.
As a 3.5 user, I would have preferred them to simply bug fix and transition 3.5 over to QT4. Some of the restructuring was needed but the complete change to the UI was totally unneeded. Instead they had to copy MS and Vista and loose the one feature that made KDE stand out for me, which was the configurable desktops, background images and locking apps to specific desktops.
As I said, all these features are available, accessible, and are arguably better than they were in KDE 3. I honestly don't know how you haven't been able to discover them.
My lungs are now half full of coffee. Thanks.
He said civilized. (Brit here)
You outed yourself as an uncivilised US-ian there.
And George Carlin reminded us again not so long ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q